2 November 2016, Renew Economy, Malcolm Turnbull blown off course by South Australia’s 100% renewable energy. It is something of an irony that prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s attempts to visit the South Australian city of Port Lincoln over the weekend should have been thwarted by strong winds – winds, it should be noted, that provided 100 per cent of the state’s power needs for much of the day. According to local media reports, Turnbull’s planned visit to Port Lincoln on Sunday was aborted when his plane was unable to land after two attempts due to strong winds. It is not the first time Turnbull’s attempts to land in Port Lincoln have been thwarted by strong winds – a similar attempt a month ago was also abandoned in the face of bad weather. The winds in Sunday were strong – not strong enough to stop wind turbines from spinning however, as deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce and South Australia Senator Nick Xenophon like to believe, but enough to provide more than 100% of South Australia’s underlying electricity demand for more than 10 hours on Sunday. According to Dylan McConnell from the Melbourne Energy Institute, who provided the graph above, wind provided more than 100 per cent of the state’s needs from 8:10am to 6:40pm. During that period the price averaged approximately negative $25/MWh. At 2pm on Sunday, wind was (very briefly) was producing 46 per cent more than underlying demand – around 1370 MW of wind and 935MW demand from the grid (which does not include rooftop solar being consumed in homes). As it happened, it was not just windy that day, but also quite sunny. And according to the APVI solar map, rooftop solar PV was producing about 293MW, which means that variable renewable energy sources (wind and solar) were producing 1,670MW. Read More here
Category Archives: Australian Response
1 November 2016, The Guardian, Great Barrier Reef: why are government and business perpetuating the big lie? At the core of the Australian government’s failure to protect our Great Barrier Reef is the big lie. Through its actions and inaction, rhetoric, funding priorities and policy decisions, the Australian government has implicitly pursued the line that it is possible to turn things around for the reef without tackling global warming. This is the big lie. Last year, when the federal and Queensland governments released the Reef 2050 long-term sustainability plan, experts were emphatic about the deceit. Eminent coral reef scientist Prof Terry Hughes commented that the “biggest omission in the plan is that it virtually ignores climate change, which is clearly the major ongoing threat to the reef”. Great Barrier Reef historian Iain McCalman wrote that the new measures “deliberately ignore the dire long-term threats to the reef that are contained in the now unutterable words ‘climate change’”. “They are akin to investing in cures for a patient’s skin diseases while ignoring their cancer symptoms,” he wrote. As the experts make plain, any attempt to decouple the future of the Great Barrier Reef from the quest to contain global warming is simply dishonest. As another expert, Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland, has said, we either “re-examine the current plans for unrestricted coal exports, taking proper account and responsibility for the resulting greenhouse emissions, or watch the reef die”. Read More here
31 October 2016, The Conversation, Turnbull wants to change Australia’s environment act – here’s what we stand to lose. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is seeking changes to Australia’s national environment act to stop conservation groups from challenging ministerial decisions on major resource developments and other matters of environmental importance. Turnbull is reviving a bid made by former Prime Minister Tony Abbott to abolish Section 487 of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act) – a bid rejected in the Senate in 2015. If it goes ahead, the change will significantly diminish the functionality of the act. The EPBC Act, introduced by the Howard government in 1999, has an established record of success. Judicial oversight of ministerial discretion, enabled by expanded standing under Section 487, has been crucial to its success. Section 487 allows individuals and groups to challenge ministerial decisions on resources, developments and other issues under the EPBC Act. An organisation can establish standing by showing they have engaged in activities for the “protection or conservation of, or research into, the environment” within the previous two years. They must also show that their purpose is environmental protection. Repealing this provision would remove the standing of these groups to seek judicial review of decisions. Standing would then revert to the common law position. That means parties would need to prove they are a “person aggrieved” by showing that their interests have been impacted directly. Read More here
21 October 2016, Renew Economy, A renewable fiction: Myths mainstream media refuses to let go. For reasons that are not entirely clear, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar appear to have gotten the better of mainstream media. For years now, many in mainstream media have been propagating myths about renewable energy in general, and wind and solar in particular. It’s unclear why this is so – whether it is simply about ideology, politics, the protection of vested interests or simply the fear of new technologies and new ideas. Since the big price spike in South Australia and then the blackout, however, the myth making has reached plague proportions and has spread to some surprising corners. From the arch conservative Andrew Bolt of News Limited to Chris Uhlmann at the ABC, and via so much of the Murdoch media, the Fairfax Press, commercial TV and radio and rather too many in ABC radio and TV, the myths have been perpetuated, egged along by conservative politicians. The instances are so many that it is impossible to count, let alone list, and for this article we will ignore the cheap sloganeering such as “renewables are a fraud”, “wind energy doesn’t work,” and “wind energy is a boondoggle.” The problem we identify in the following examples is that there still seems an inherent bias against wind energy, and it appears to be based either on a lack of understanding of how energy systems work, or how they are changing. They seem convinced that renewables are the primary cause of high electricity prices, that fossil fuel plants don’t need back up, that transmission lines were only built to link remote and unreliable wind farms. They fail to understand – and appear to have no interest in asking – that new technologies can make the grid cheaper and more stable, and that we should be accelerating the transition rather than slowing it down and turning to old and expensive alternatives. Read More here